The New Cult Canon: Wet Hot American Summer

A certain amount of audience flattery goes into a
spoof. Spoofs make audiences laugh in part because they feel in the know for
getting whatever reference is being thrown out there for ridicule. More often
than not, these references tend to be too obvious and pandering, and in the
worst cases, spoof filmmakers don't even bother crafting much of a gag about
them; they merely want to congratulate viewers for being hip to the source
material ostensibly being parodied. That's why the cottage industry of Jason
Friedberg/Aaron Seltzer spoofs like Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Meet The Spartans is the worst thing going
in comedy right now: Winking at the audience for picking up on nods to 300, Meet The Parents, Pirates Of The
Caribbean,
and other such obscurities is about as base as it gets.

Wet Hot American Summer flatters its audience
just like any other spoof, but the fact that its targets are so narrow and
particular makes it perversely inspired. Here's a movie from 2001 that doesn't
concern itself with yesterday's box-office hits, but with a sub-sub-genre of
comedies from the late '70s to the mid-'80s, starting with Meatballs and its sequel, and
including other disreputable standards like the TV movie Poison Ivy (with Michael J. Fox and
Nancy McKeon), SpaceCamp, and the non-gory scenes in their slasher cousins
like Friday The 13th and Sleepaway Camp. But it doesn't stop there: WHAS is pitched specifically
to Reagan-era latchkey kids who grew up watching these movies on television,
and have a certain generalized nostalgia about the fashions, hairstyles,
graphical elements, and other minutiae that seeped into their wood-paneled
family rooms. Moreover, the film also speaks to a generation of middle-class
Jewish boys and girls whose parents shipped them off to summer camp for one or
two months at a time. So if you're a middle-class Jew who came of age in the
early '80s, watched a lot of television, and are given to nostalgia for
misspent youth, Wet Hot American Summer is the movie for you. Little wonder that
the film grossed $300,000 in theaters while the likes of Date Movie made close to $50 million.

But such is often the nature of a cult movie: What
doesn't appeal to many appeals greatly to a self-selected few, and you can
count me among Wet Hot's giddy acolytes. The film had me at hello: The opening
credit sequence, with its bubble-letter fonts and freeze-frames, are a time
capsule loaded with the outdated styles of yesteryear—feather-cuts and
tight perms, midriffs and ass-hugging cut-off jeans on men, cotton bikini-tops
and plunging necklines on women. And then there's the brilliant score, by Craig
Wedren and Theodore Shapiro, featuring pump-you-up synth lines and hot licks
that lend themselves to embarrassing bouts of air guitar and French kissing at
its least refined. There are gags aplenty tossed around in the film, not all of
them funny, but its bedrock value lies mainly in its obsessive, overwhelming
period detail; if you aren't happy enough just lounging around in the ambience,
the episodic, hit-or-miss comedy could make for a bumpy ride.

Written by Michael Showalter and David Wain, and directed
by Wain—part of the brain trust behind the MTV sketch-comedy series The
State—Wet
Hot American Summer
takes place on the last day at Camp Firewood in mid-August, 1981. At this late
stage in the season, the rules have slackened to the point where adolescent
boys and girls are sneaking into each other's cabins for all-night snogging
sessions, and the teenage camp counselors are too apathetic or defeated to do
anything about it. (Having actors clearly in their mid- to late 20s or older
playing counselors in their late teens is one of many sly comments on
camp-movie conventions.) But still, the last day is the culmination of many
subplots that have been in play all summer long: the big game against the
snooty rival camp, the big talent show, and a multitude of possible hookups
that have to happen now or never.

There's precious little to give the movie any kind
of structure. Outside of the talent show—which features such dazzlements
as a boy who can balance a broom on his palm, a musty old Catskills comedian, a
performance of Godspell's "Day By Day," and a camp nerd with mysterious
powers—the only pressing third-act issue is a piece of Skylab falling
from space. Most of the other subplots are romantic, like the shy courtship
between hippie-dippie camp director Beth (Janeane Garofalo) and mustachioed
astrophysicist Henry (David Hyde Pierce), and a love triangle involving the
comely Katie (Marguerite Moreau), her moody superstud boyfriend Andy (Paul
Rudd), and the inexperienced Coop (Showalter), who's given to painfully earnest
proclamations like the following:

The clip above is an example of the movie spinning
off from its summer-camp premise and into other territory, but it's also a
prime example of how the film repeatedly goofs with clichés. The scene reminds
me a little of a favorite Onion headline: "Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets
Real-Life Man Arrested." Wain and Showalter are wise to the eye-rolling
conventions of the movies, and they trust that the audience will be knowing
enough to snicker at the type of monologue that sounds romantic, but is in fact
creepy bordering on pathological. (Not sure what my favorite part of that
speech is: The bit about Katie sometimes being late for shul, or the promise to
"hold her and provide for her," which are not the words many free-spirited
teenage girls long to hear.) But the best inside-the-machinery moment—and
one that relates more directly to the camp-movie genre—brilliantly
unpacks all those "big game" finales that pit the slobs versus the snobs. And
once again, it's Showalter's Coop who delivers the goods:

Within the framework of a spoof, Wet Hot
American Summer
branches out into little character bits and odd tangents that sometimes relate
to Meatballs
knock-offs and summer-camp experiences in general, or are just random silliness
for its own sake. That catch-as-catch-can style is rooted in sketch comedy and
improv, and it risks a little unevenness in order to score some bigger, less
expected laughs. The strategy mostly pays off: For all the subplots I could
have done without, like Molly Shannon as an emotionally brittle Arts &
Crafts teacher who turns to her students for counsel, there are untold dozens
of funny non sequiturs (like the kids who "want to watch The China Syndrome again") and inspired minor
turns, like a 'Nam-damaged chef (Christopher Meloni) who learns to embrace his
weird sexual peccadilloes after conversing with a can of mixed vegetables.

Wet Hot American Summer was dismally received by
the majority of critics at the time (EW's Owen Gleiberman, Newsweek's David Ansen, and um, us
excepted), with many balking at its loose-to-nonexistent structure, its curious
fetish for the most trivial of cinematic subgenres, and, well, a failure to
make them laugh. If you don't find the film funny, you don't find it
funny—comedy is subjective, after all. (And hey, there's no accounting
for taste.) But those other supposed liabilities are probably the film's
greatest assets, and they complement each other nicely: Having a loose
structure gives Wain, Showalter, and the rest of the cast a lot of freedom to scribble
around in the margins, yet the whole enterprise is anchored by its obsessive
fetishization of the period. There's something oddly satisfying about the sheer
volume of '80s bric-a-brac on display here—the Trapper Keeper folders, the
Pepsi Light cans with the peel-back can tops, the vintage soundtrack
contributions from the likes of Loverboy, Rick Springfield, and Jefferson
Starship. Or even the silly ways "cool" manifested itself at the time, like
Paul Rudd's hilariously petulant lothario, or Ken Marino's preening,
swaggering, secretly virginal skirt-chaser.

And oh, the montages. Cheesy montage sequences
accomplished so much in the '80s—they transformed a wimp from Jersey into
theKarate
Kid, got Rodney Dangerfield through his oral exams in Back To School, and increased the power
of space lasers in Real Genius—and they work their magic on several
occasions here. As much as I appreciate a montage where the chef shows Coop
"the way"—set to the inspirational strains of "Higher And Higher"—there's
something special about the sequence where Beth and her fellow counselors drive
into town for a wild hour. It's a montage that's really about montages, which says
everything that needs to be said about how this infectiously self-conscious
film operates.